BEIJING — The central actors in the trial of one of China’s most influential legal activists remained largely silent on Wednesday morning to protest what they said were flaws in the country’s politicized judiciary.

The activist, Xu Zhiyong, 40, and his two lawyers decided that there was no point waging a legal fight against prosecutors’ claims that Mr. Xu had disrupted public order by organizing protests during which participants unfurled banners demanding social justice and meaningful constraints on corruption.

“These hearings ignore basic legal precepts, so there’s no way my client can get a fair trial,” one of the lawyers, Zhang Qingfang, said on Tuesday. “It’s just a piece of theater, which is why we will remain silent.”

A legal defender once praised by the state news media, Mr. Xu faces five years in prison if convicted, an outcome that is all but certain.

His trial in Beijing is widely seen as an effort by the new Chinese leadership to quash growing public demands for political overhaul at a time when a cooling economy has made officials skittish about the potential for social unrest.

Mr. Xu was detained in July as part of a crackdown on the New Citizens Movement, an amorphous civic campaign he helped start in 2012 that drew thousands of participants, some of whom took to the streets nationwide. By adopting some of the Chinese government’s own promises to fight corruption and strengthen the rule of law, the group sought to compel change without provoking a harsh backlash from the Communist Party.

In retrospect, those tactics appear to have been overly optimistic. In the past year, the authorities have detained more than two dozen members of the group as part of a broad assault on public dissent and liberal ideas that includes tighter control over the news media and online commentary.

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Liu Chunxia, a supporter of Mr. Xu's, was detained on Wednesday by police officers near the court where he was being tried in Beijing.Credit
Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

Lawyers for the jailed New Citizens Movement members — including, in addition to Mr. Xu, seven who will go on trial in the coming days — said they had little doubt that the verdicts had been predetermined. “Whether we are even in the courtroom to defend our clients makes no difference,” said Chen Jiangang, who represents two men scheduled to stand trial on Monday at a separate courthouse in the capital. “We lawyers have been shackled and gagged.”

Viewed against President Xi Jinping’s vows to improve judicial fairness, the complaints by Mr. Chen and other lawyers highlight the challenges the Chinese authorities face in using the courts to contain the New Citizens Movement.

Judicial officials have told defense lawyers that they will be barred from cross-examining prosecution witnesses and from calling witnesses of their own: legal procedures recently advocated by the nation’s top court. Legal experts also said the authorities were violating Chinese law by holding separate trials, a move they said was intended to prevent the defendants from providing testimony that could be useful to one another’s defense.

On Wednesday night, the court trying Mr. Xu released a statement saying that Wang Gongquan, a venture capitalist who was detained in September, had been released on bail. It said that Mr. Wang, a close friend of Mr. Xu who helped finance the New Citizens Movement, had confessed to “unlawful criminal activities” and “expressed deep soul-searching over his own conduct.”

Mr. Wang could not immediately be reached for comment.

Another lawyer, Zhang Xuezhong, said that prosecutors had repeatedly shuffled the charges against his client, Zhao Changqing, underlining what he called the weakness of allegations that Mr. Zhao had disrupted public order. “The process keeps getting more and more opaque,” Mr. Zhang said, noting that the brief protest his client is accused of organizing on a wide plaza in central Beijing last year drew only a handful of participants. “In political cases like this, the court becomes an instrument for political prosecution.”

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Jerome A. Cohen, an expert on Chinese law at New York University, said that by barring the public and the news media from the trials, the authorities were proving hollow the promises of Mr. Xi and his newly appointed Supreme Court chief, Zhou Qiang, to curtail wrongful convictions. “There doesn’t seem to be any connection to what they are preaching and what is being practiced,” Mr. Cohen said. “There’s a kind of Alice in Wonderland absurdity to these proceedings.”

According to a person who attended Mr. Xu’s trial, both of his lawyers declined to cooperate with prosecutors.

Officials chose an especially snug courtroom, the person said, with just 18 chairs, and refused to give seats to several foreign diplomats who showed up. Mr. Xu’s wife and sister were the only family members allowed entry.

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Prosecutors say Mr. Xu disrupted public order by organizing protests calling for social justice and constraints on corruption.

On Wednesday evening, a statement that Mr. Xu had reportedly tried to read in court began circulating online. “Deep in your hearts, you are terrified — terrified of having open trials that citizens can freely attend, terrified of your names appearing on the Internet, terrified of the free society that is coming,” the statement said. “We are citizens, the masters of this country, not its subjects or lackeys, rabble or a mob.”

Reached by telephone on Wednesday night, Zhang Qingfang, the lawyer, confirmed that Mr. Xu had written the 50-minute statement but said he had only been able to read about 10 minutes of it before the presiding judge stopped him, saying it was irrelevant to the case.

In contrast to the high-profile prosecution of Bo Xilai, the ranking Chinese leader sentenced to life in prison for corruption last year, the authorities have not been eager to publicize the prosecution of Mr. Xu and his associates. The topic has been scoured from the Internet, and the trials are unfolding while many Chinese are distracted with travel plans for the Lunar New Year — and are especially unlikely to find train tickets to the capital.

Eva Pils, a legal scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the timing was noteworthy given that politically delicate trials in China often take place during Christmas, when many foreign journalists are on vacation. The scheduling of the New Citizens Movement trials just before the Lunar New Year, she said, pointed to official anxiety about Mr. Xu and his cause.

“To those involved in this movement, it suggests that the authorities are more concerned about the domestic reaction, which perhaps presents a ray of hope for the movement,” she said.

Such fears are not unfounded, at least judging from the tenacity of those who braved the gantlet of police officers to gather near the courthouse on Wednesday morning, carrying banners decrying “injustice” and shouting slogans against corruption.

One participant, Yu Chunxiang, 61, a veteran petitioner from Shanghai, said she wanted to show party leaders that jailing Mr. Xu and his associates would be futile. “You can keep putting people in prison, but behind them are thousands of others who are willing to take their place in the fight for justice,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2014, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Chinese Activist’s Lawyers Call His Trial Unfair. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe